CW: child abuse, sexual assault, violence, death.
I was reading Genesis but I kept imagining everything happening where I grew up, in my childhood home. When I reached the part about Lot and his daughters, I became fixated on them. I never finished reading Genesis. This poem came out of that.
Summer air clumps in lungs
iron-rust in our throats
I sleep on the floor with my sister
under our bed
just as Momma taught us.
The heat goes to heaven
Coolness seeps from below.
The Father-God burns in the groves
Daddy with the rest of them
I ran from him there
My sister too
He grabbed my hair, dragging me
into the trees. I clawed at the ground
moldy oranges my only tether.
My fingers dig into the tender skin.
When I was little, Daddy brought me here
he handed me one of the sweet fruits
the rind brilliant shining
he slipped his thumb into the navel
ripping the flesh
asunder.
He gave me a half. My teeth envel
oped the flesh, tearing it from the rind.
The blood-orange juice ran down my chin
Now it trickles down my thigh
strong fingers in the thew.
Momma sits at the table.
She clumps in the wet air
My sister breaks a bit of her finger
for the cooking water.
I sprinkle her on the greens.
Daddy says she looked
back that’s why she’s
salt.
My sister and I kiss her
on the cheek. We slice open our
lips on the coarseness of her skin.
I say into her crusted ear
“what did you see?”
Look back, Look back, Look back, Look back
she whispers to me.
Daddy sleeps in the bed.
He/I placed the wedding sheet
over me/him. The one with the red stain
and the hole.
He tasted the salt-tears through
the fabric. The warp and weft of his thrusts.
“Just like her, you are”
he whispers to me.
I think it’s the drink.
I take Daddy by the hand
God-The Father too.
They stumble and trip over the roots
Breaking through the soil.
But my sister steadies them.
We slide them in
between the orange trees.
I pluck a ripe one from
a tree, burdened by the weight of its multitude.
I tear the fruit in two with my
hands. I give one half to Daddy
the other to The Father-God.
Daddy sinks his teeth into the flesh of the
citrus. The juice runs down his chin
I wipe it with my thumb.
We lay them down with leaves
crisp and delicate.
I drag him by the hair between his legs.
Heaven kept the rain for months.
The summer air dried them up.
I let my sister light the match.
Daddy burns in the orange grove
with The Father-God and the rest of them.
My sister and I lay under our bed
My Daddy’s, My Momma’s, My sister’s, and mine.
I take her hand as we breathe in the summer
air, whetted by the smoke of
Daddy, The Father-God, and the blood-orange trees.
